A curated collection of Internet articles, original writing, and guest writers about art history and education.

Category Archives: Photography

It was customary, in pre-modern Europe, to grant condemned death-row inmates a last meal before their demise. This action was highly symbolic and was believed to be done in an act of superstition to ask for forgiveness to the executioner, the judge and witnesses and absolve any potential acts of vengeance.

Regardless of your opinion on the death penalty, this post, though potentially appetizing to some will turn your stomachs upside-down. The very talented Henry Hargreaves has come up with an eye-opening, yet haunting series of photos documenting death-row inmates last meal requests.

In a recent interview with Indulgd.com we asked…

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?I’m a self taught photographer living in Brooklyn originally from New Zealand. My work seems to touch on 4 main themes – food, bright colors, childhood nostalgia and breasts!

What first inspired you to take these shots?After hearing about the abolishment of the last meal in Texas I read up on what inmates actually requested. As I read about their food tastes it humanized them for a moment in my mind and brought the gravity and unnatural practice of state sponsored executions.

What has been people’s reactions to your work?I mainly hear the compliments but I’m sure it’s not everyones cup of tea.

What is your personal favorite photo that you have taken?I’m always looking toward the next photo.

What was the eeriest meal in your opinion?Ricky Ray Rector when he told the guard he was saving his pie for later. Rector was mentally disabled so I feel he had no idea of what was about to happen to him.

What projects have you been currently working on?Just finished a series of Gingerbread Art Galleries that were shown at Art Basel and will be exhibited in NY on Wednesday at Dylan’s Candy.

Gertrude Käsebier and Rinko Kawauchi have two things in common: they’re women and they’re photographers. Käsebier was an early American photographer who took portraits of Native American medicine men and worked with Alfred Steiglitz. Kawauchi is a contemporary Japanese artist who makes abstracted images inspired by Shintoism.

Nonetheless, they sit right next to each other in the aptly titled Women Photographers: From Julia Margaret Cameron to Cindy Sherman, Boris Friedwald’s survey of female photographers published by Prestel this past spring. The book collects the work of 55 practitioners, from pioneers of the form to contemporary photojournalists. Friedwald also includes short bios of each artist as part of his goal to present “the variety and diversity of women who took—and take—photographs. Their life stories, their way of looking at things, and their pictures.”

Cover of ‘Women Photographers’ (via randomhouse.de)

Sounds admirable enough. Yet it’s impossible to imagine an equivalent book titled Men Photographers: From Eugène Atget to Jeff Wall. Male photographers, like male painters, male writers, and male politicians, are the default. The implication, intentional or not, is that no matter how talented, female photographers are women first and artists second.

Ideally, endeavors like Friedwald’s serve to illuminate lesser-known artists, who may have been discounted because of their gender (or race or sexual orientation or class). But more often such exercises become a form of de facto segregation, whether it’s a BuzzFeed quiz on how many of the “Greatest Books by Women” you’ve read or a Wikipedia editor isolating female novelists in their own category. These projects are often undertaken in a spirit of celebration, but their thoughtlessness generally renders them pointless at best and misogynistic at worst.

Unfortunately, Friedwald’s editorial choices only exacerbate the project’s questionable gender politics. As the unlikely pairing of Käsebier and Kawauchi suggests, the photographers are arranged in alphabetical order, which allows for little meaningful interplay between them. And without any general background to give them historical or artistic context, the artist bios feel equally unhelpful. By striving for breadth over depth, Friedwald has created one more collection unified only by the gender of its artists, thus suggesting that being a woman is the most important factor in these photographers’ work.

The issue with Women Photographers isn’t just that it bunches female photographers together; more importantly, it fails to justify how they’re important to each other. Context is vital to historical surveys, and Friedwald provides almost none. That’s too bad, because the overlooked role these women have played in the development of their medium is well worth exploring.

As a newer art form that requires relatively little training, photography was open to women from its inception in a way that painting and sculpture weren’t. But, as Naomi Rosenblum writes in the introduction to her 2010 book A History of Women Photographers, despite women’s comparative success in the medium, histories and critical surveys of it often ignore their contributions. As such, Rosenblum’s book aims not only to highlight the work of female photographers, but also to dig into what their gender means for their lives and careers. Rosenblum offers not just a who but a why.

Spread from ‘Women Photographers’

Friedwald, on the other hand, fails to provide a compelling reason for grouping these women together or to illuminate any connective tissue between them — and in doing so ends up creating exactly the sort of gender ghetto he supposedly wants to avoid. He would’ve been better off listening to the artists he aims to champion, including Eve Arnold, whom he quotes: “I didn’t want to be a ‘woman photographer.’ That would limit me. I wanted to be a photographer who was a woman, with all the world open to my camera.”

Photography as medium is not dead, but you can argue it is in a contemporary state of flux. In his new book Post-Photography: The Artist with a Camera, released last month by Laurence King Publishing, Robert Shore amasses 300 works by artists who are using photography in an altered state, whether it’s staged, found imagery, or claiming the digital as their own.

Cover of “Post-Photography: The Artist with a Camera” (courtesy Laurence King Publishing)

“Post-photography is a moment, not a movement,” Shore writes. The book claims to be the first publication to look specifically at these artists who are now experimenting intensely with the found and distorted in the visuals of photography. Shore sets the current scene in an introductory essay:

“Given the abundance of pre-existing visual material in our hyper-documented world, it’s unsurprising that an increasing amount of photographic art begins with someone else’s pictures. There’s nothing new about appropriating found imagery for fine-art purposes. But the sources, methods, and goals are fast-evolving. If digital culture has transformed photographic practice — that is, how pictures are taken and displayed — it has had no less profound an impact on how found materials are sought and then manipulated.”

Each artist in the large book with its cardboard cover is given space to discuss how and why they work in a “post-photography” mode. There’s Julia Borissova delicately collaging petals on vintage photographs from the St. Petersburg flea market, along with Steffi Klenz concocting volatile chemicals on negatives of furniture she stacks on the verge of collapse. Others create their own bridges between fiction and reality, like Cristina de Middel documenting the 1960s Zambian plan to send astronauts to the moon, giving imagery to a story that lacks it. The augmentation of reality by digital means is on heavy view, especially in appropriation like Clement Valla’s Postcards from Google Earth that show highways bending at unnatural angles, revealing how the layered system of topography and aerial imagery actually works.

Photographs of paintings with their museum glares by Jorma Puranen (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

Cristina De Middel, “Iko Iko” from “The Afronauts” (2011)

Cristina De Middel, “Bongo” from “The Afronauts” (2011)

Yet there are all also artists actively working outside of digital manipulation, such as Christy Lee Rogers whose photographs in the water at night of people swirled in colored clothes resemble Old Masters paintings. “My intention is to create something magical that could exist, not something that I feel people will think is fake or false,” she explains.

Back in 2011, as Shore points out in Post-Photography, the World Press Photo awards caused quite a stir when Michael Wolf got an honorable mention for his A Series of Unfortunate EventsGoogle Street View photographs. The continued break down and manipulation of photography as it stretches beyond its definitions is likely just beginning its cascade as more and more we view the world through the digital.

Work by Brendan Flower in “Post-Photography” (photograph of the book by the author for Hyperallergic)

Nicole Belle, “Untitled,” from “Rev Sanchez” (2008)

Michael Wolf, “Tokyo Compression 17″ (2010), a series on commuters on the train

Richard Mosse, “Rebel Rebel” (2010), from “Infra,” taken with Aerochrome infrared film

Benjamin Lowy, “Perspectives II: Nightvision” (2003-08), from “Iraq” taken with night-vision goggles issued by the US military

New York used to be a different town than it is today. People use terms like “Old New York,” and “The Bad Old Days” to talk about the 70s and 80s. In fact, the crime wave that is associated with New York City lasted well through the late 1990s.

For example, in 1977 there were 1,919 murders in New York. By 1991 that number reached an all-time high of 2,571. The murder rate didn’t dip below 1,000 until 1998. To put it in perspective, from 2000-2010, it has been hanging around 800.

I recently stumbled across a treasure trove of photos from this lost era. Some are watermarked, but many are from message boards and peoples flickrs, so it’s hard to give photo credits. Here are a few of the authors I was able to figure out: